Please join us on December 6 at Performance Works NW as we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the ongoing MY DAY series!
Saturday, December 6, 2025
5-7pm: Community My Day
7pm: Live reading and live drawings
We encourage you to participate in the “Community MY DAY” from 5-7pm. We will draw, write, photograph and interpret the neighborhood around Performance Works, or the spaces we encounter on our commute to Performance Works.
At 7pm we will gather at PWNW to hear and see what everyone created followed by live readings by James Yeary and Chris Ashby accompanied by live drawings by Nate Orton that will cover select MY DAY chapbooks from the last twenty years of production.
About the MY DAY chapbook series:
MY DAY was established in 2005 by visual artist Nate Orton with poets Chris Ashby and James Yeary and is an ongoing self-published documentation of the Northwest. Nate spends a full day drawing his surroundings accompanied by Chris and/or James in a predetermined geographic location and route. Later they reconvene to combine their works into small chapbooks. Each issue is constructed using cut and paste techniques with combinations of letterpress, relief, lithography, rubbings, photocopy, typewriter, offset printing, hand coloring and/or pochoir. Currently they are working on issue number 57.
BIOS
Nate Orton
Born and raised in North Central Idaho, Nate Orton now lives in Milwaukie and regularly walks his city with sketchbook in tow, documenting the common yet sometimes surreal scenes and situations he stumbles upon. Nate shows his paintings, prints and books throughout the Northwest.
James Yeary lives in Portland Oregon. Since 2009 he has helped organize the Spare Room reading series. He has published chapbooks for c_L books, along with a newsletter, and has collaborated extensively with other writers and artists. Books include: The Do How, with Kyle Schlesinger; Rolling in the Easy Circumstances, with Sam Lohmann; Who Killed My Chicken? with Chris Ashby; and many publications in Nate Orton’s my day series. He works in a surgery-adjacent medical laboratory.
Chris Ashby is a poet and writer living in Portland. They are the editor and publisher of Couch Press, and a co-organizer of the Spare Room Reading Series. Often collaborative, they’ve worked with artist Nate Orton on his multi-decade My Day project situated in the Pacific Northwest, and on several limited edition books with James Yeary. Their newest chapbook is From Tiered Walls, a collaboration with artist Joe Galván (Couch Press/Vesta Press).
Gallery
MY DAY #52 “riding a bike along the unofficial border of unincorporated Oak Grove OR” Photocopy with staple binding. 4X5.25″ closed. 12 fold-out pages. 2022. Edition of 100. -Nate 
MY DAY #14, #51, and #53, “Six Views of 82nd Ave.” Offset, relief and photovcopy. Varied dimentsion. Edition of 40–Nate & James. 
Performance Works NW || Linda Austin Dance 